Karen Marie Moning

“He's treating her like she's fourteen and he's a normal adult, acting like he's taken her under his wing. Like he needs her detecting skills, same as Barrons did to Mac, and she's falling for it, same as Mac. He's lining up his dominoes, so they fall more easily when he feels like pushing them over, conserving energy so he doesn't have to hunt her when he's ready to kill her.”

“She thinks he's not an animal like Barrons. That he's more civilized. She right, he is more polished. But it only makes him more dangerous. With Barrons you expect to get fucked up royally. With Ryodan you don't see it coming.”

“You said somebody beat me to damning you.”“Melodrama. Did it curry favor? You kissed me.”You don‘t feel damned?”“God said, Let there be light. I said, Say please.”

“I want to drop to all fours and bay like a wild thing drunk on being hungry and strong, a beast that could fuck for days without cease if I could only find someone that could take it as hard and long a I can give it.”

“Kid, when will you learn.”“You’d be amazed the things I know.”“You might be able thrash your way out of a spider-web, but thrashing in quicksand doesn’t work. The harder you fight, the more ground you lose. Struggling merely expedites your inevitable defeat.”“Never been defeated. Never will be.”“Rowena was a spider web.” He touches my cheek with the hand holding the knife. The silver glints an inch from my eye. “Do you know what I am.”“A great big pain in my ass.”“Quicksand. And you’re dancing on it.”“Dude, what’s with the knife?”“I’m not interested in ink anymore. You’re going to sign my contract in blood.”“Thought you said it was an application,” I say pissily.“It is, Dani. To a very exclusive club. What’s Mine.”“Ain’t nobody’s. ““Sign.”“You can’t—““Or Jo dies. Slowly and painfully.”“Dude, why you still talking? Unchain me and give me the fecking contract already.”

“He looks at me, looks at my head, and his lips twitch like he's trying not to bust out laughing. "You don't need that... whatever the fuck it is.""Ain't dying by Shade. It's a MacHalo.”

“Dani, Dani, Dani."I flinch. I've never heard anyone say my name so gently. It creeps me all kinds of out.He's towering over me, arms crossed over his chest, scarred forearms dark against the rolled-up sleeves of a crisp white shirt.Heavy silver cuffs glint at both wrists. The light is smack behind his head, as usual."You didn't really think I'd let you get away with it," Ryodan says.”

“She's too young. Too innocent.Too human. For what I'm becoming.”

“I had a sudden dismal view of my future, of being led around and asked incessantly, like one of those Verizon commercials, Do you feel sick now?”

“-I'm going to kill the kid. - Barrons says faintly.Ryodan makes a burbling sound like a bodly laught. -Get in line”

“All the sudden Ryodan’s standing one inch away from me, hand under my chin, holding my face up to his. “You’ll never be just anything. A tsunami can never be ‘just’ a wave.”“Get off my chin.”“I like that about you. Waves are banal. Tsunamis reshape the Earth. Under the right circumstances, even entire civilizations.”I blink.“You’re going to be one hell of a woman one day, Dani.”

“The unknown is a vast, paralyzing limbo.”

“All I can think is: His head is gone and I don’t know how to merge with the Book.”

“A Seelie. A fucking prince,” Lor said. “He’s got a couple hundred more Seelie from a dozen different castes waiting outside. Threatening war. Demanding you shut the place down, stop feeding the Unseelie.” I gasped, “V’lane?” “You told him to come!” Ryodan accused. “She knows him?” Lor exploded. “It’s her other boyfriend,” Ryodan said. “Besides Darroc?” one of the other men demanded. Lor glared at Barrons. “When are you going to wise up and shut that bitch down for good?”

“I hope they change my drugs soon. Whatever I'm on isn't working.”

“Keeping vigil over her are two monsters of very different breeds but monster just the same.Death on her left.Devil on her right.”

“I lay my head on his chest and listen to his heart beating, solid and sure.....he reads me so well. He's known about my emotional empathy since we were children. Nothing disturbs him...Few can lie to me... I don't know the truth, only that there is a lie. It takes a scrupulously honest man to love me. That's my Sean. We learned to trust each other completely before we were old enough to have learned suspicion.”

“Dani: Crank it up. Lets get this party started. *I hand Dancer my iPod.* Lor: What is this crap. Where the hell is Hendrix on this thing?Jo: Did you get any Muse?Dani: Muse is something you doJo: Distrubed is something you areDancer: And Godsmacked is something you getLor: Don't you have any Motley Crue or Van Halen?Christian: How about some Flogging Molly?Ryodan: Whats the deal with all the Linkin Park, for fuck's sake.Dancer: Mega has a crush on ChesterJo: You got any Adele?Dani: Got some Nicki Minaj.Ryodan: Somebody kill me now.”

“I pinch the sentence's butt with my other hand and tug it from my skin like a leech, smack it back on the page and clamp the book shut. Part of it's hanging out, and it waves jerkily at me with what appears to be blatant hostility. I stick the book back on the upside-down shelf over my head, pissed off sentence first, counting on the gluey base to hold it in. All I need is a badly mangled, irate sentence stalking me.”

“Kid, you might just annoy me into killing you.”

“His face was in my neck and he was breathing hard. Was he grieving me? Already? Would he miss me? Had I, in some tiny way, come to matter to this enigmatic, hard, brilliant, obsessed man? I realised he'd come to matter to me. Good or evil, right or wrong, he mattered to me...”

“He doesn’t get that I’m not interested in a superhero boyfriend. I’m going to be the superhero that can kick his ass from one end of Dublin to the other.”

“Aplazar las cosas está en el número tres de mi Lista de Estupideces. Sigues terminando exactamente donde no querías estar, haciendo exactamente lo que no querías hacer, con la única diferencia de que perdiste todo el tiempo en el medio, durante el cual podrías haber estado haciendo algo divertido. Incluso peor, probablemente estuviste de un humor estresado y desagradable todo el tiempo que estuviste evitándolo. Si sabes que algo es inevitable, hazlo y termina con ello. Avanza. La vida es corta.”

“She loves. And she doesn't know how to pull it back when you have to, because sometimes you sure as feck have to. Got to grab it up with both hands and pull it back before somebody turns into knives and uses it to cut you to pieces.”

“See things for what they are. Drop your blinders and raise the sewer to eye level. Admit that your swimming in shit. If you don't acknowledge the turd heading down the drain towards you; you can't dodge it.”

“I thought you were disgusted by the people that come to my club.” “They’re still people.” He presses the button again. “If you go outside, you will be killed. If you make noise, you will be sent outside. Don’t piss me off.” Just like that, Chester’s goes completely silent.”

“Velvet looks horrified. “If you are fool enough to address King R’jan, you will do it thus and in no other manner! ‘My King, Liege, Lord, and Master, your servant begs you grant it leave to speak.’”“Wow. Totally delusionary there.”“Good luck with that,” Ryodan says. “She doesn't beg to speak, or do anything else. You can lock her up, down, and sideways and it’s never going to happen.”I beam at him. I had no idea he thought so highly of me.”

“I smack myself in the forehead. “Holy priceless collection of Etruscan snoods, they’re not moving!” I exclaim. There’s a choking noise over my head somewhere. “Etruscan snoods?” I glow quietly inside. Some accomplishments mean more than others. I am officially the Shit. Now and forever. “Dude, watch your question marks. I just pried one out of you.” “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” “Admit it, you lost your eternal fecking composure.” “You have an obsession with a delusion about how I end my sentences. What the fuck are Etruscan snoods?” “Dunno. It’s just another of Robin’s sayings. Like, ‘Holy strawberries, Batman, we’re in a jam!’ ” “Strawberries.” “Or, ‘Holy Kleenex, Batman, it was right under our nose and we blew it!’ ”

“You could ask me to teach you.”“Huh?” This night is getting weird in a hurry. “Teach me like you’re teaching a class or something? What are you going to call it: ‘You Too Can Be a Sociopath 101’?”“It would be more like a graduate-level class.” I start to snicker. His sense of humour sneaks up on you. Then I remember who’s talking and bite it off.”

“Procrastinating is number one of my Stupid List. You still end up exactly where you didn't want to be, doing exactly what you didn't want to do, with the only difference being you lost all that time in between, during which you could have been doing something fun. Even worse, you probably stayed in a stressed-out, scrappy mood the whole time you were avoiding it.”

“God the horror of watching yourself from the outside as everything you know about yourself gets stripped away and demolished. Not just the loss of power over your body, but power over your mind. Rape in the deepest, most hellish sense of the word. But wait, there's a spark. Inside that hollowed out woman there's a place they can't touch. There's more to me than I thought there was. Something that no one and nothing can take away from me. They can't break me. I won't cease. I'm strong, and I am never going to go away until I've gotten what I came for. I might have been lost for awhile but I was never gone. WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU? With an explosive inhalation I snap upright in bed, and my eyes fly open like coming alive after being dead and interred in a coffin. I AM Mac and I am BACK!”

“I do not know who I am anymore. I though I was animal. I am no longer so sure. It's hard to say what makes the mind piece things together in a sudden lightning flash. I've come to hold the human spirit in the highest regard. Like the body, it struggles to repair itself. As cells fight off infection and conquer illness, the spirit too has remarkable resilience. It knows when it is harmed, and it knows when the harm is too much to bear. If it deems the injury too great the spirit cocoons the wound, in the same fashion that the body forms a cyst around infection, until the time comes that it can deal with it. For some people that time never comes. Some stay fractured, forever broken. You see them on the street pushing carts, you see them in the faces of regulars at a bar. My cocoon was that room.”

“You think you’re going to chain me to a wall then stand here and tell me why it’s okay that I am the way I am? That because of all the crap folks put me through when I was young it’s all right that I turned out like this? Dude, I don’t have a problem with how I turned out. I like me.”

“There are men you build a future with, Dani. And then there are men that you know, going in, that you're only making a memory with. I know the difference..Some memories are worth the price. I'll deal with it.”

“And when he did that, my hands curled into fists because I thought about touching his face like maybe I could catch joy in my hands and hold it.”

“When I thought I'd killed him, I felt more alone than I've felt in a long time. Like I couldn't stand walking through this city knowing he wasn't in it. Like somehow, as long as he was out there somewhere, if I was ever really in trouble, I knew where I could go and while maybe he wouldn't do exactly what I wanted him to do, he'd keep me alive. He'd get me through whatever it was to live another day.”

“There are more balls in twenty feet of street here then there are in all of Dublin, and I'm proud to be swaying in the nut sack.”

“It's just another of Robin's sayings. Like, 'Holy strawberries, Batman, we're in a jam! Or, Holy Kleenex, Batman, it was right under our nose and we blew it!”

“I've tried to move [the sidhe-seers] during times of peace and quiet and had the luck of a broken mirror nailed beneath an upside-down horseshoe with a ladder nearby that a black cat just walked under.”

“They loved so intensely that moments of their life have been etched into the very fabric of the mansion. Some say the king designed it that way, so if one day he lost her he could come live with her residue.”

“It's a sponge and I'm a sponge and for a second there all our sponge parts are one and I don't just have square pants, everything about me is squarish because I'm part of a wall.”

“Just one time before I turn into the villain of this piece, just one time before I become the fourth and final Unseelie prince, I want to be her Highlander. And her hero.”

“Life's a choice: you can live in black and white, or you can live in colour. I'll take every shade of the rainbow and the gazillion in between!”

“He closes his hand around mine and I hold on. I like his hand. It's big and holds easy but sure. It's the kind of hold that says, I got you if you want me, but I'll let you go if you feel like running for a while.”

“I know that when he has sex he laughs like the world is a perfect place. And when he did that, my hands curled into fists because I thought about touching his face like maybe I could catch joy in my hands and hold it.”

“I'm not going anywhere until you're safe," Christian says to me, real quiet. "Isn't that quaint. The chivalrous Unseelie prince with the dick of death," Ryodan mocks.”

“Fear and doubt are major stampeders.”

“I lock eyes with my reflection and don’t look away. The day you look away you start to lose yourself. I’m never going to lose myself. You are what you are. Deal with it or change.”

“Some people fall apart when they get hurt. Puddle into apathy and despair and never recover. They wait all their lives for someone to come along and rescue them.”

“The wound you refuse to dress is one that will never heal. You gush lifeblood and never even know why. It will make you weak at a critical moment when you need to be strong.”